A happy tale from two states

The reasons for this are complex. To begin with, the general practice in wage employment programmes is for payments to be made on the basis of the ‘task’ performed, or the total output per day. So if an NREGA labourer is working on a worksite to extract gravel for building a road, her daily rate is determined on the basis of the total quantum of gravel extracted through the day. To manage this process, a junior engineer — usually a block level officer — is assigned the task of taking measurements at the worksite and on that basis calculating the total wage due. It is, of course, impossible for the junior engineer to make daily visits to each worksite in his area of jurisdiction and he usually waits till the work is completed before taking measurements. A great amount of secrecy surrounds this calculation process. Consequently, the individual labourer is never quite aware of the correlation between individual work done and wages received. This encourages free riders — after all, what incentive would you have to work if you knew that your wages depended on the output of hundred others? As a result productivity suffers and minimum wages rarely received.

Public pressure for transparency and regular monitoring by civil society has helped push the Rajasthan Government to look for innovative ways to streamline measurement and payment processes. One such experiment took place in November this year when the government collaborated with the Rozgar Evum Suchna Ka Adhikar Abhiyaan, a coalition of civil society organisations in Rajasthan, to develop a decentralised work site management system. Over 165 activists from the abhiyaan participated in a month-long campaign to create a pool of trained worksite managers — an innovation on the traditional mate who maintains muster rolls and supervises the work site — that take daily measurements of worksites and determine daily output. The activists worked closely with local officials to develop model worksites and identify management practices that ensure transparency in measurement processes and through that overcome the free-rider problem. The key emphasis was transparency. All labourers were kept informed of the total quantum of work that needed to be completed for them to access the minimum wage. Moreover, labourers were divided into groups of 5 each and the worksite manager was responsible for assigning specific tasks to each group at the start of the work day.

The results have been truly fantastic. In Jalore district as many as 3000 mates were trained to become full-fledged worksite managers. Each mate was given a calculator, a measuring tape and taught simple formulae for converting measurements into wages. More, over 2,000 of these trained mates were women. This could dramatically improve work conditions for women — who are the major participants in NREGA in the state. At the end of the training, most labourers in the model Panchayats were able to access Rs 73 per day.

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